Ye Olde D&D Alignment System

[Fairfax]

Gary didn't have a stance on this himself. He just liked to poke at his fans.

He did have an actual stance:

Lawful Good does not equate to stupid or foolish, it means the PC must follow the Law as determined by the deity the Paladin acknowledges, and thus promote Good according to that Law.

As I have pointed out at times, a Paladin might well execute a group of captives after they have converted from their former (Evil) alignment to Lawful Good, for that act saves their sould, prevents them from slipping back into error.

A Paladin will not normally sacrifice himself, fight needlessly, unless it is a situation where honor and duty demand that. Such sacrifice would have to be demonstrably for the betterment of his deity, or else based on anoath the character made prior to the dire situation.

While in general a Paladin can not lie, that does not mean he must say anything, or can not answer evasively or mislead-if that is according to the tenents of his avowed LG deity.

A Paladin played by someone that does not understand the basis of the Code of Chivalry taken to the extreme and attached to religion is likely unplayable, but that's the fault of the player, not the class.

The non-combatants in a humanoid group might be judged as worthy of death by a LG opponent force and executed or taken as prisoners to be converted to the correct way of thinking and behaving.

Paladins are not stupid, and in general there is no rule of Lawful Good against killing enemies. The old addage about nits making lice applies. Also, as I have often noted, a paladin can freely dispatch prisoners of Evil alignment that have surrrendered and renounced that alignment in favor of Lawful Good. They are then sent on to their reward before thay can backslide

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is by no means anything but Lawful and Good. Prisoners guilty of murder or similar capital crimes can be executed without violating any precept of the alignment. Hanging is likely the usual method of such execution, although it might be beheading, strangulation, etc. A paladin is likely a figure that would be considered a fair judge of criminal conduct.

If Gary Gygax had been left in control of a GW-owned TSR, there probably would have been some increase in the amount of campaign setting material published, but it's doubtful that it would have amounted to more than a small fraction of TSR's actual output described above.

I think that aspect would've been relatively similar (minus FR). TSR wanted to keep the systems relatively consistent, and most of its competition came from games offering different worlds and styles. Gygax would've made fewer changes/additions to the core systems than 2E and its splatbooks, so the focus on settings would've been the logical step for him as well. Also, one of his plans for AD&D was to make it compatible with sci-fi adventures, so we probably would've seen a Gygaxian sci-fi setting and a tweaked ruleset for it.

After Gary Gygax was forced out of TSR at the end of 1985, TSR created the Forgotten Realms setting as a replacement for the Greyhawk setting, which had been based on Gygax's personal campaign.

The FR campaign setting was created to replace Dragonlance, actually. In 86, TSR was concerned that Dragonlance would fade away, so they wanted another high fantasy setting lined up.

 

[Nalenth]

The FR campaign setting was created to replace Dragonlance, actually. In 86, TSR was concerned that Dragonlance would fade away, so they wanted another high fantasy setting lined up.

Interesting, especially considerering that Dragonlance was fairly popular in its heyday.

There were many supplementary materials to FR too, so it was never "history-less" or "culture-less". Granted, the human cultures were largery based on real cultures. It was expanded upon in later years.

 

[Elex]

The alignment system is awesome, because in the world of D&D good and evil are objective things. Of course this is simplistic. It's supposed to be. You can have stuff like the Detect Evil spell which would be meaningless in the real world. You can have creatures like orcs which are literal embodiments of the dark side of man, and illustrate the depravity of real-world men with allegorical reflection. You can have an artifact like the Necronomicon which drives good men insane but nurtures evil. None of this is can really be done in a fair way without having rules for it. If you hate the rules, fine, don't use them, but don't pretend that there is no possible value in using them.

I get it, some people are only comfortable with rules that describe how many stabs with a sword it takes to kill a dood. Those people are cowards and limited thinkers.

don't fogot also the blood war.

 

[Neanderthal]

Do they still have alignment languages or have they gone way o Dodo?

 

[Zombra]

You're not Cadmus

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The FR campaign setting was created to replace Dragonlance, actually. In 86, TSR was concerned that Dragonlance would fade away, so they wanted another high fantasy setting lined up.

Do you have a citation for this? TSR had temporarily suspended Greyhawk AD&D publications* after Gygax's ouster in late-'85, whereas Dragonlance publications in 1986 included the last three of its original 12-module series, the sequel trilogy (Legends) to the immensely popular original Dragonlance trilogy of novels (Chronicles), and at least one gamebook in the Dragonlance setting. 1987 saw the publication of the Atlas of the Dragonlance World, Leaves from the Inn of the Last Home (a collection of various material related to the setting and novels), the Art of the Dragonlance Saga, the Tales trilogy of short story anthologies (including three novellas by Weis and Hickman, authors of the original Dragonlance novels), at least one gamebook in the Dragonlance setting, and most importantly a hardcover setting book (Dragonlance Adventures).

*At the time of his ouster, Gygax had already finished his second Greyhawk novel starring Gourd the Rogue, which saw publication at the beginning of 1986. This was followed by a 4-novel series written by Rose Estes bearing the Greyhawk logo but taking place in the furthest fringes (or beyond) of the established setting.

Dragonlance was created specifically as a Tolkienesque setting, in contrast to the existing Greyhawk setting, with an epic 12-module series of adventures mimicking, to a considerable extent, the structure of the Lords of the Rings trilogy (complete with the Fellowship of the Ring Companions of the Lance splitting up for a large part of the story) and with TSR's first experiment in novel publishing, an experiment that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams due to riding the wave of the ongoing takeover of the fantasy literature market by Tolkien imitators. The Forgotten Realms, on the other hand, was a setting very much in the mold of Greyhawk, albeit much blander, as would be expected from something based on the personal campaign setting of Ed Greenwood rather than of Gary Gygax. It was intended to be the generic, default AD&D campaign setting as described even before its publication in an article in Dragon Magazine #119.

 

[Fairfax]

Do you have a citation for this?

It's in 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons. In the FR chapter, Steve Winter says:

In 1986, there was concern about Dragonlance fading (yeah, it sounds silly now, but it was a concern at the time), and we were looking for the "next world" to replace it. I did not know Ed personally at the time but I did know that he wrapped his articles for THE DRAGON in descriptions of his home campaign. I suggested to my boss, Michael Dobson, that we check into whether Ed had more background for that world. I made the initial contact with Ed, and for my troubles I became the in-house half of the team.

 

[Azarkon]

Besides, we've all known a solution to alignment "issues." General reputation, reputation within factions, etc.

Why? Because you can't quantify your own self and intentions. However, reputation - how others view judge you - would be a degree more "realistic." But the real reason for the existence of such a system is to obviously tie it to the gameplay, to make you think about your decisions. Decisions within the game, that is, not decisions in real life.

"Real-ness" has little correlation with games unless, again, you want a sim.

Alignment is a reputation system, if reputation applied to cosmological entities, which it does in Dungeons and Dragons, since the nine alignments form the basis of the entire multiverse. It is therefore a coherent system, which often cannot be said for faction-specific reputation systems where the immense complexity of human morality is reduced to a simple calculus of "did your action benefit us or not?"

Thus the common phenomenon of modern day CRPGs:

• Killed our guy? That's a fifty reputation minus!
• Killed enemy guy? That's a fifty reputation plus!
• Killed equal numbers of both? Congratulations, we neutral!

When in fact, this is absurd.

Are reputation systems the way to go? Certainly. But that's like saying numbers are the way to go for representing combat.

Dungeons and Dragons's alignment system is as arbitrary as any other, but it is exceptional in the sense that it is actually a principle component of the world-building, and so provides concrete guide lines for how players interact with the world. For the same to work for less specified reputation systems, you'd need a Dungeon Master who can intelligently interpret motives and ideologies - a rarity in practice.

 

[Cael]

Gary didn't have a stance on this himself. He just liked to poke at his fans.

He did have an actual stance:

Lawful Good does not equate to stupid or foolish, it means the PC must follow the Law as determined by the deity the Paladin acknowledges, and thus promote Good according to that Law.

As I have pointed out at times, a Paladin might well execute a group of captives after they have converted from their former (Evil) alignment to Lawful Good, for that act saves their sould, prevents them from slipping back into error.

A Paladin will not normally sacrifice himself, fight needlessly, unless it is a situation where honor and duty demand that. Such sacrifice would have to be demonstrably for the betterment of his deity, or else based on anoath the character made prior to the dire situation.

While in general a Paladin can not lie, that does not mean he must say anything, or can not answer evasively or mislead-if that is according to the tenents of his avowed LG deity.

A Paladin played by someone that does not understand the basis of the Code of Chivalry taken to the extreme and attached to religion is likely unplayable, but that's the fault of the player, not the class.

Which is something that I have always maintained about the alignment system. Not the fault of the system, but fault of the idiots playing it.

One minor nitpick, though: The Code of Chivalry has a religious component, IIRC.